Part Three in a series of profiles about Westmount day centre the Open Door.

When Tommy Kingwatsiak carves, he’s practically in a trance.

For hours, he has filed down a chunk of African Wonderstone, transforming the chalky rock with his hands and a four-inch piece of steel. Each chisel stroke adds to a layer of dust covering Kingwatsiak’s hair, face and the baggy clothes that hang from his body.

The skin on his hands looks like it could crack and bleed at any moment. But in the end, he has created a smooth piece of art — something that reminds him of home.

“This is a mother and cub polar bear,” he says, proudly hoisting the carving in his left palm. “Hopefully, I get $180 for me, personally. I don’t really care what they do with it or what they sell it for. I just need the money.”

Kingwatsiak, 31, sells his art in galleries on Sherbrooke St. and in Old Montreal. While the quality of the work speaks for itself, the income isn’t steady and so Kingwatsiak lives on the streets.

“When you go to rent an apartment, they need to know you can pay each month,” he says. “I can’t guarantee that.”

By day, he’s one of about a half-dozen Inuit artists who carve behind the Open Door, a Westmount shelter that provides them with a workspace. The shelter has supplied them with tools and stones for the past year.

Kingwatsiak didn’t have more than a few dollars to his name when he hitchhiked to Montreal more than a decade ago.

Before living in Quebec, he spent some time in Ottawa to reunite with his father. And before that, Kingwatsiak grew up in Cape Dorset, an Inuit fishing village on the coast of Baffin Island.

“In Ottawa, I met a girl … she was trying to hitchhike alone and she needed somebody to watch over her,” he said. “So I just agreed, and me and her hitchhiked 21 hours to get here.”

Carving helps Kingwatsiak earn money for an afternoon movie or a trip to the arcade. He says he wants to save enough for a plane ticket home. In Cape Dorset, Kingwatsiak’s grandfather taught him to become an artist.

“One day, when I was about nine, he grabbed a piece of soapstone from our backyard and (ground) it down for me,” Kingwatsiak says. “He told me to keep filing it, and that was my first standing bear piece. I’ve been carving ever since.”

Nemo John Awa also learned to carve from his family in Pond Inlet, a settlement on the jagged northern tip of Baffin Island. He doesn’t like to talk about the circumstances that led him to a life on the streets of Montreal.

“Some bad shit went down back home,” he says. “I won’t ever go back. I really hate when people ask me about back home.”

Most of the roughly 1,000 Inuit who live in Montreal come here to study or work, but some are pushed south by factors beyond their control. Six sources from Nunavut and Quebec’s Nunavik region spoke to the Montreal Gazette about a housing crisis in the north that makes living there nearly impossible.

“There were 15 of us in a four-bedroom house in my village. That’s no way to live,” one source said. “When you’re crammed into such a tight space, sometimes things get violent, sometimes you don’t have nowhere to go. So you leave.

“Or maybe you stay and your kids get taken away by (child family services) because you’re living in a dump. And then your kids grow up and they age out of the system. What chance do they have out here?”

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All of these sources are either residential school survivors or the descendants of residential school survivors. One source spoke of teachers who referred to her by her “Eskimo Identification Number” — a government tracking system used to identify Inuit.

“My parents were beaten by their teachers. They were called savages, and when they became parents, they didn’t know how to love their children,” another source said. “They wanted to love us, but they couldn’t.”

For the Inuit who do wind up on the streets, many gravitate toward the Open Door. Roughly half of the shelter’s clientele are Inuit.

Awa’s art brings the Inuit traditions to life — he will turn a giant block into a perched owl or a seal craning its neck. In one particularly striking piece, a hunter chiselled out of serpentine stone stands aboard a kayak, wielding a spear above his head.

When he isn’t carving, sometimes Awa sits at one of the Open Door’s computer terminals composing rhymes that he posts to Facebook.

“Soon as ma flow starts’ I compose art like the ghost of mozart,” he writes in one post. “Slims switch sides on me’ I thought we was cool why you want me to die homie?”

Earlier this fall, Kingwatsiak says he’d had enough of life in the city.

“I thought about buying a plane ticket and going back, maybe for good,” he says. “I’m getting pretty tired of life down here. Sometimes I end up drinking when I don’t want to. I need a change.”

In the end, though, he spent the money he had saved and now he’s back to square one.

For Awa, there’s no turning back.

“I’ll see my sister in Ottawa sometimes and my father comes down once a year to see me,” Awa says. “I’m alone out here, but I prefer it that way. Sometimes I hang out with a friend or two, but mostly I’m alone. And that’s okay.”

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